Faculty Commentary

Wikimedia Commons / Mark Dixon

In Terminiello v. Chicago, Justice Jackson famously commented that the constitution “is not a suicide pact.” His point was in response to the Court’s decision to invalidate Chicago’s disorderly conduct conviction of Arthur Terminiello, who had given a speech that threatened to breach the peace. Writing for the Court, Justice Douglas rejected Chicago’s assessment that [...]

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Wikimedia Commons / Matt H. Wade

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of President Biden’s speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s rejection of Roe v. Wade is that he gave the speech at all. Presidents historically have wisely refrained from commenting on Supreme Court decisions. Biden’s delivery of the speech on the very same morning that the Court delivered its opinion in Dobbs [...]

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Subhashish Panigrahi - Wikimedia Commons

On May 11, 2022, the Supreme Court of India (SC) passed a landmark order to put the sedition law in abeyance for the first time ever since India’s independence. This would suspend it until its re-examination or further notice. The SC order is extremely significant in light of the continuous misuse of section 124A of [...]

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(c) Wikimedia Commons Westonmr

Now facing further rounds of terror attack, Israel must prepare itself along the intersecting dimensions of law and strategy. Law, the first dimension, is universal. It applies to all combatants, everywhere. Strategy, the second dimension, is integral to the creation and maintenance of any single state’s national security policies. From the beginning, a recurrent Palestinian [...]

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“Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” said W.E.B. DuBois once. And now we have another day in the USA, another shooting by a white supremacist. Authorities say that an 18-year-old white male who apparently shot and murdered ten people in Buffalo, New York, was motivated by hatred [...]

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In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning a half-century of abortion jurisprudence, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly argued that this difficult issue should be decided by the people through their elected representatives. Such calls for democracy to work, however, should be looked at with great skepticism by the American people, given how often and how [...]

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Last week, Louisiana made headlines by proposing a bill that would make abortion a homicide and explicitly allow pregnant people to be charged with murder. While the bill ultimately failed to advance in the Louisiana House of Representatives, it’s important to know that many states already have laws on the books that could result in [...]

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California’s 1996 ballot initiative protecting medical marijuana users from state criminal prosecution kicked off the modern marijuana reform era in the United States. In part due to federal prohibition, state medical marijuana laws prompted an array of interesting and intricate legal questions. Some issues concerned the reach of federal law after state reforms. Could doctors [...]

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